College Insecurity

How do you obtain the “American Dream”— a dream for a better future for you and your family? For many West Ranch students, it’s through college, which is considered by many to be the path to a higher paying career and brighter future. But for a good deal of people, it’s not enough to just go to college; it needs to be the right college— the college of your dreams— and most of the time, that college is extremely selective. The obsession with elite postsecondary institutions has completely permeated our society. Popular culture icons from Gabriella Montez to Serena Van Der Woodsen are seemingly effortlessly admitted to Ivy League universities, almost as if it’s a prerequisite to being the main character. Successful figures like John F. Kennedy and Mark Zuckerberg appear to always graduate from or drop out of elite institutions, adding to the feeling that attending such a school is necessary for success. There are dozens of lists that rank colleges on cryptic metrics that supposedly culminate in a measurement of a quality education, but are actually more reflective of arbitrary factors. All of this fanfare built around the college admissions process encourages students to aim for the country’s most prestigious institutions. This lofty goal may have been more obtainable back in Zuckerberg’s time— when Harvard had a 11.1% acceptance rate— back when one could feasibly take certain steps during high school that would give them a reliable chance of being accepted by at least one member of the Ivy League. However, things have changed. Harvard’s acceptance rate has dropped to a record-low 4.0% in recent years, marking a clear increase in difficulty. But it’s not just the world’s top private institutions that struggle with this issue; it’s begun to leak into the UC and Cal State system as well. UCLA’s admission rate has dropped by almost two-thirds and UC Berkeley’s by almost half since the year 2000. Students with their sights set on schools which have less than a twenty percent acceptance rate can no longer just be a top student with perfect grades and extracurriculars. Nowadays, students need to have a “spike”—something to make them stand out— but as more students than ever are setting their sights to the top, it inevitably leads to disappointment, especially when it’s impossible to truly know what colleges want. West Ranch guidance counselor Mr. Gimber has had students return to his office after the college admissions cycle is over and ask what went wrong for them. “That’s not really a question that I, or any of us as counselors have an answer for, because it’s not so much that you did anything wrong, as much as it’s just the college wasn’t able to take you in,” Gimber said. “Unfortunate as it is, they don’t have enough space to take everybody. They get so many qualified candidates and how they have to sift through who they feel they want at the college is kind of a trade secret. They never really let us counselors know, they give us sort of this kind of general idea of what students can do to help themselves, give themselves that competitive advantage when they’re trying to apply to a college. And then ultimately, we don’t really understand all of the reasons behind why someone got in versus another student. It really sort of runs the gamut. We’ve seen students from all backgrounds both get in and get rejected.” The stress that comes from the admissions process can understandably morph into jealousy and insecurity. It’s hard not to compare yourself to or feel a bit resentful towards your classmates or friends who receive coveted spots at toptier universities. Mr. Gimber said, “It’s common. I think that probably comes from, if we’re talking psychological here, that ‘who am I, to myself versus who I who am I to the group?’ I think that’s an easy thing for us to fall into. That ‘how did I do compared to everybody else?’” The way the college admissions process is set up makes it easy for students to be compared with each other by distilling all the factors that make them unique into a handful of essays and statistics. However, this means that the process inherently encourages students to compare themselves with their peers. This is helpful when it allows students to find schools that are a good fit for their academic prowess, but can also be incredibly toxic when students start comparing each and every little detail about themselves with others. Mohamed El Fouly, a senior at West Ranch, recently had to deal with this phenomenon. He says, “I personally feel rather happy with my [accomplishments], but then when I compare [myself] to other people, I do feel a bit more disappointed at times.” Unfortunately, the issue doesn’t stop with just El Fouly. Personally, I’ve seen these comparisons really hurt people as university decisions have rolled out these past few months. For some, the decisions validated all the effort they put into high school, both academically and through extracurriculars, but others began to question if they made the right choices. After all, what was the point of all that hard work and tedious classes only for them to be rejected? This system of comparison especially hurts those who did activities just to be good college applicants. These students put themselves in a much more precarious and emotionally damaging position if it doesn’t work out. Then, because it’s so easy to compare themselves with others, regret can quickly take over and it becomes easy to overanalyze what they could have done differently to get a “better” outcome. The whole system is set up in a way that fosters comparison and jealousy where it can feel like nothing is ever enough. Nearly everyone I know has fallen into this trap in some capacity, including myself, and the only way out of it is to realign your goals with what you actually want. Feelings of college insecurity are easy to develop and difficult to overcome but many are able to do it by recontextualizing their goals. As El Fouly puts it, “[The] reasoning that led me to overcome that feeling of jealousy was this: it doesn’t matter what other people do, it doesn’t matter what other people get, as at the end of the day you just have to be the best you that you can be. If you just [put] yourself down, the only person you’re going to hurt is yourself. There’s no reason to keep pestering yourself about what could be. Just think about what is and do the best for the future.”